Book Repair and Restoration: A Manual of Practical Suggestions for Bibliophiles

by Mitchell S. Buck

REPAIRING HOLES AND BROKEN SURFACES. We will now consider any serious wounds which go deeper than the surface of the leather. One often sees covers of calf, sheep or morocco deeply stripped or even pierced like the coats of Diogenes and Ruy-Blas; the back, the sides and corners, especially the lower ones, broken away even to the point of exposing the boards. This is a state of cynicism which calls for some remedy; the simple smearing on of starch is powerless to heal such damages.

It is often possible to restore missing fragments by means of new pieces of the same kind and tint of leather. I will assume that the amateur possesses a collection of odd scraps of morocco, brown calf, old vellum, etc., removed with more or less right from books whose pages have been unfortunately ruined, to be devoted to more humiliating uses. These should be searched for a suitable piece; sometimes this is found. The essential point is to match the grain of the leather. When the tint is too light, it can easily be darkened with water-colors; when it is too dark, one must search further. One may, however, lighten a little piece of calf which is too dark by means of very weak acid.

Suppose the desired patch found. The hole or broken place in the cover is cleaned and the edge cut sharp to prevent further tearing, and in this is set a piece from the patch, cut exactly to fit. If the amateur has not time to do this careful mosaic patching, he may, with a small, thin blade, raise the edges of the leather about the hole and, applying paste or glue directly to the board, slip in a patch piece which has been roughly cut a little larger than the hole and pared thin around the edges. The edges of the hole should then be moistened with paste and firmly pressed down into place over the patch. A patch made in this way is less agreeable to the eye than when made by the first process, for by this latter method there always remains a sort of raised pad which accents the form of the hole.

Let us consider now the repair of bruises, more or less deep, caused by rough contact with some hard, sharp or rough body.

When the stripped parts are still hanging to the cover, they should be straightened out and pressed back into place after being given a light coat of thick starch paste. But if the stripped parts corresponding to the bruise are missing, how shall the furrow, which reveals a spongy appearance, be brought up level with the surface of the cover? With a corresponding patch inserted in the fissure? This is an operation, I think, very difficult to carry out, and it is simpler to cut the furrow into a definite hole if one wishes to proceed in this way. Let us try and imagine some kind of putty for such repairs.

I do not wish to write hastily of any method of procedure for the fabrication of bruised leather, but it seems to me that a paste or putty formed of powdered or shredded leather, boiled with a little flour paste, would answer our purpose. With this one could fill up the furrow and then, when the paste has dried, scrape off the excess surface and burnish the dried inlay. This method should answer very well, but there is still another which I have tried, although it is not so delicate. I employed flour paste mixed simply with Spanish white.[16] With this, I puttied up my book like a picture in process of being retouched. I even succeeded, with this paste, in imitating the grain of the morocco. I tinted the patches by applying color mixed with gum. But this sort of repair is only applicable to parts of the cover away from the edges; in the neighborhood of the hinges, this unelastic paste will break loose or, at least, render the book difficult to open.

I experimented also with gutta-percha. This brownish substance has the property, at a certain temperature (towards seventy degrees)[17] of melting and adhering to the leather and, on cooling, recovers its natural, semi-elastic state. But after having been melted at a fire or, if the season is right, by sunlight through a lens, it turns brown and will not harmonize in tint except with very dark calf, and I have found no method of lightening it.

We will now speak of repairing and patching the cover in those parts which serve as hinges. This is an operation practicable only when a substance very thin and supple can be found. I have succeeded in restoring this part of a book by using a strip of gold-beaters skin, slipped between the back and the side and fastened, on one part, to the edge of the side and, on the other, to the boards lining the back. I then gave to this skin a tint corresponding to that of the cover. The break remained visible; I only reconnected the parts so that the book could be opened and closed.[18]

Would one succeed better by using a thin piece of rubber? I have never tried this, but this substance, I believe, could not be obtained in very thin sheets except by being considerably stretched, a process which would soon destroy the elasticity which is its essential quality. Perhaps the broken hinges of a dark calf book could be joined without great difficulty by means of the liquefied gutta-percha mentioned above.

I have sometimes repaired the corners of a volume with more or less success. In cases where the damage was slight, after having loosened the paper on the inside of the cover at the corner, either with, or without, moistening it, I pushed back the damaged skin for a short distance, then glued upon the board over the corner a fragment of leather of the same kind and tint, pared thin, then pressed down the rough edges and fashioned the new corner by moistening the leather. Then, having replaced the broken edges of the original leather, I recolored the patch to an exact match.[19]